Saturday, November 17, 2018
Stanich's and the Death List
We are obsessed with lists, and this is almost always to our detriment. My own field, legal education, has been overtaken with a slavish devotion to the US News rankings, a development which has made everything associated with the actual teaching of law worse. Like many lists, almost everything about the US News rankings is a lie, beginning with the idea that there is a "best" law school. And this isn't sour grapes-- I went to the school that US News falsely calls the "best." It was and is a great school, but there is no objective claim to being "better" than many others by any reasonable metric.
When I was in high school, I ran cross country and track. I loved that sport in part because of its objectivity: you really did know who was "best" on a given day, because they finished the race first. Even sports like college football lack that-- just check out the rankings, where you can find a team ranked ahead of a team it lost to on the field.
I'm thinking about this because of a great article I read by Kevin Alexander, I Found the Best Burger Place in America. Then I Killed It. In short, Alexander made a list of the best burger joints in America (something that on its face is about objective as listing the "best" law schools). Doing so killed the place he named as "best." It is worth a read.
